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Article published In:
Thematic issue: New perspectives on conflict
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9:2] 2021
► pp. 271–296

“Maleducados/Ill-mannered” during the #A28 political campaign on Twitter

A metapragmatic study of impoliteness labels and comments in Spanish

ORCID logo | IULMA, Universitat de València

This paper approaches the study of conflict through an examination of Spanish metapragmatic labels and comments of impoliteness on Twitter. The aim is twofold. It first aims to confirm the attributed importance of the label maleducado /ill-mannered in the specific context of Twitter and of digital discourse more generally, on quantitative and comparative grounds; then, it investigates this label, and the metapragmatic comments where it occurred, in a contextualized corpus of tweets compiled during the political campaign of Spain’s General Elections of April 28, 2019. The study draws from five ad hoc corpora specifically compiled from Twitter, and a general corpus of Spanish digital discourse provided by Sketch Engine. The analysis adopts a corpus-based metapragmatic approach, which combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings revealed that maleducado was the most frequent metapragmatic label under scrutiny in the Twitter corpora and motivated the subsequent study of lay conceptualizations of this term.

Keywords: conflict, metapragmatics, impoliteness, Spanish, Twitter
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Impoliteness metapragmatic labels
  • 5.Locally situated understandings of maleducado on Twitter
    • 5.1Social actions
    • 5.2Linguistic patterns
    • 5.3Grounds for evaluation
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00048.bou
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